Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry By Michael Ignatieff, with contributions by K. Anthony Appiah, David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur, and Diane F. Orentlicher. Edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann. Princeton University Press, 187 pages, $19.95
Is the world moving forward or backward when it comes to honoring andprotecting basic human rights? In Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Michael Ignatieff sees both progress and retrenchment. Since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, there has been a "global diffusion" of the central ideas and language designed after World War II to "create fire walls against barbarism."
Virtually no government claims to be wholly unaccountable to the worldcommunity for the treatment of those within its borders. A vibrant array of nongovernmental organizations -- from Human Rights Watch and AmnestyInternational at the global level to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan andthe Tunisian Human Rights League at the local one -- report on and agitateagainst human-rights abuses in almost every country, and their campaigns commandattention.
And yet just in the last decade, at a time when the human-rights movement'sinfluence seemed greater than ever, the fire walls proved at times to be paperthin. The international community was tragically slow to act in Bosnia and failedto save 800,000 people from barbarism in Rwanda. "In the next fifty years,"Ignatieff warns, "we can expect to see the moral consensus that sustained theUniversal Declaration in 1948 splintering even further."
The two essays that form the core of Ignatieff's book were originallydelivered as lectures at Princeton University in 2000. Since this book'spublication, Ignatieff, the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policyat Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, has sounded an even more pessimisticnote. In a recent New York Times article, he suggested that "the question after September 11 is whether the era of human rights has come and gone," citing evidence that a number of countries, including China, Egypt, Russia, the Sudan, and even Australia, are exploiting the war against terrorism to cloak their human-rights abuses. (One might say the same about the United States, which since September 11 has detained thousands of immigrants without charges or access to counsel, questioned legions of other Arab-American men around the country, and set up military tribunals -- lacking in basic due-process protections -- to try suspected terrorists.)
On the hope, though, that moral progress is still possible, Ignatieff intendshis book to force human-rights proponents to think carefully about what they wishto achieve and how they ought to proceed. Advocates often face resistance, frommany quarters, on the very notion of a universal human-rights norm -- that allpeople of the world can agree on rights and restraints that apply everywhere,from a police interrogation room in Brooklyn to a detention camp in Central Asia.Ignatieff concedes that thoughtful people in all cultures wonder where the lineshould be drawn, and who should be doing the drawing. "Human rights discourse,"he asserts, "ought to suppose that there are many differing visions of a goodhuman life, that the West's is only one of them, and that, provided agents have adegree of freedom in the choice of that life, they should be left to give it thecontent that accords with their history and traditions."
Ignatieff's advice is to embrace a "minimalist" approach, as opposed to anexpansionist vision that views every positive condition of human life as a matterof legal entitlement. Be careful, Ignatieff warns, not to ground human rights inthe essential nobility of the human spirit, given abundant evidence to thecontrary. If not based in a faith in fundamental human dignity, rights shouldflow from "assumptions about the worst we can do, instead of hopeful expectationsof the best." In the end, the common ground amounts to a version of the goldenrule: "not much more than the basic intuition that what is pain and humiliationfor you is bound to be pain and humiliation for me."
An appealing part of Ignatieff's argument is that deliberation and discourse,more than rules, is the essence of a human-rights culture. The activist tendencyto present a "a set of moral trump cards" is part of what Ignatieff sees as theproblem of "human rights as idolatry." If human rights are the one true faith(and their instruments sacred texts), there is always the danger of anothercrusade. While of course there are some abuses that are "genuinely intolerable"-- hence the effort to define a minimalist core -- most are in the realm ofcompeting rights, and their resolution "never occurs in the abstract kingdom ofends, but in the kingdom of means." If there is agreement on the need to keeptalking, with respect for the views of others, and if it is genuine, then you'rewell on your way to a rights culture.
There is much that is attractive about such an approach. Butthere are problems, too. First, as Princeton provost Amy Gutmann points out inher introductory essay, however minimalist a human-rights program is, therealways will be arguments about what is in and what is out: "What counts as aminimalist set of human rights is by no means either obvious or agreed-upon evenby good-willed people," she writes.
It seems simple enough, for example, that torture and murder are to beruled out unequivocally, because "people from different cultures may continue todisagree about what is good, but nevertheless agree about what is insufferably,unarguably wrong," as Ignatieff writes. But there is slippage all the time,sometimes from unlikely quarters. In recent months we have seen arguments emerge(from civil libertarian / provocateur Alan Dershowitz, among others) that thereare some situations in which governments ought to have torture as an option (if,say, a known terrorist believed to have information about an impending attack isbeing held). And what about the death penalty as practiced by Alabama and Texasand condemned by Amnesty International -- traditionally the most minimalist ofhuman-rights groups -- and by every European ally of the United States? If thereis a minimal standard that human-rights advocates can count on it is theinviolability of the body. Cross that line, sanctioning torture andstate-sponsored killing, and you brutalize the culture.
Though Ignatieff is an elegant writer, and though he makes an importantcontribution in his discussion about the centrality of deliberation, a lot ofwhat he has to say seems oddly out of sync with the reality of contemporaryhuman-rights activism. If minimalism is meant to strengthen the credibility ofWestern rights advocates, it is likely to have no such effect in much of theworld, particularly in many countries where the challenge to universalism isgreatest. That is because Ignatieff's minimalist approach leaves little room forthe social and economic rights also embodied in international covenants and inmany national constitutions. No one who works on human-rights issues in thedeveloping world can fail to be aware that virtually all frontline human-rightsadvocates there -- not to mention many in Europe and the United States -- do notaccept such a hierarchy of rights. Though economic rights -- such as the right tobasic subsistence -- are still largely aspirational, that doesn't mean they arenot deeply important to human-rights advocates (and their critics) in much of theworld. In much of Africa and Asia, it is the perceived selectivity of manyWestern human-rights advocates, not their broader concerns, that undermines theircredibility.
Ignatieff acknowledges, as most traditionalists do, that it is hard to takeadvantage of political and civil rights when subsistence is in question, andinvokes Amartya Sen's observation that no famine has occurred in a country with afree press to argue for the primacy of political freedom as a prerequisite to the"struggle for social and economic security." Indeed, I think this is exactlyright as a matter of priority and strategy. But concentrating on civil andpolitical rights has not been sufficient to pursuade some in developing countriesthat activists are properly concerned about issues of basic sustenance.
More compelling are Ignatieff's reservations that military interventions onbehalf of human rights as recently practiced are "consuming their legitimacy"rather than reinforcing respect, as they have been "unsuccessful" and"inconsistent." Here, however, Ignatieff is himself inconsistent with theminimalism he espouses. In Bosnia, the United States and its allies may not have"succeeded in anchoring a human rights culture in shared institutions," buthelped put an end to ethnic slaughter. It could have done the same in Rwanda, hadthe United States seen Central Africa as being as vital to its national interestas is Central Europe.
In traditional human-rights discourse, threats to rights are seen as comingprincipally from despotic and overreaching states, so most rights advocacy seeksto limit the power of governments. Ignatieff challenges advocates to overcomethis mindset. But many already have. Writing about Russia five years ago inThe American Prospect, Stephen Holmes made exactly that argument. The most sophisticated rights advocates are well aware, as Ignatieff rightly notes, that weak and disintegrating states, not over-powerful ones, have spawned human-rights crises in the Balkans, the Great Lakes region of Africa, and Central Eurasia. They understand that you can't have a rights regime without a functioning state at the center, and that state failure calls for concerted regional and international action and assistance.
The problem, as Ignatieff recognizes, is that such a task is beyond thecapacity of the human-rights community. He poses some tough and uncomfortablequestions about the limits of the movement's power and reach, noting that "fewmechanisms of genuine accountability connect [nongovernmental agencies] and thecommunities in civil society whose interests they seek to advance." It is thepaucity of constituency, not of vision, that is the most serious shortcoming ofthe human-rights movement today.
Another problem is the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the United States whenit comes to human-rights enforcement. In a passage that should shame us all,Ignatieff writes:
The most important resistance to the domestic application ofinternational human rights norms comes not from rogue states outside the Westerntradition or from Islam and Asian societies. It comes, in fact, from within theheart of the Western rights tradition itself, from a nation that, in linkingrights to popular sovereignty, opposes international human rights oversight as an infringement on its democracy.
Ignatieff speculates that of all the ironies in the history of humanrights, the one that would most astonish Eleanor Roosevelt, who pushed soardently for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "is the degree to whichher own country is now the odd one out."
Ignatieff's essays are bookended by a critical introduction byGutmann, who edited the volume, and comments at the end by K. Anthony Appiah,David A. Hollinger, Thomas W. Laqueur, and Diane F. Orentlicher, along withIgnatieff's response. Hollinger adopts the voice of a "patriarchal, theocraticauthoritarian" to pose tough questions for the minimalist approach: "Your humanrights agenda is a slippery slope. ... you remind me of those American liberalsin the 1950s and early 1960s who said that the end of segregation would not meanintermarriage." Orentlicher, responding to Ignatieff's warnings about humanrights as "idolatry," questions his resistance to those who would link humanrights to the sacred, writing that "universal acceptance of the human rights ideadepends on its legitimation within diverse religious traditions, and not justalongside them."
On the whole, though, Ignatieff's respondents are too much like him intheir relationship to human-rights issues -- they include a philosopher, twohistorians, a political scientist, and a law professor -- for the book to havemuch of an edge as the similarly conceived volumes in Beacon Press's NewDemocracy Forum series often do. I found myself wishing that the commentators hadincluded former government officials such as Harold Hongju Koh or John Shattuck(both of whom headed the State Department's human-rights section during theClinton years), or human-rights activists such as Dorothy Thomas, foundingdirector of Human Rights Watch's Women's Rights Division, or Xiao Qiang of HumanRights in China. They might have tempered Ignatieff's well-framed arguments witha wider range of experience.
